Further Notes on Heidegger

and van Gogh

( 1994)

FTER PUBLISHING THE ARTICLE in 1968, Icon­

A tinued to study the art, letters, and life of van Gogh and his ideas,
and owe to some colleagues valuable references to other clues for
interpreting van Gogh's art and thoughts. I have added the results of
these pointers and my later reflections to what I believe are valid addi­
tions to the articles on van Gogh that Ipublished in 1940 and 1968.
I note my indebtedness in this revised text to the French periodical
Macula and its editor Yve-Alain Bois, now at Harvard University.
I have taken into account the article by Profesor Gadamer, a disci­
ple of Heidegger, on Heidegger's changes in his late y ears, and two
hand-written corrections by him in the private copy of the margin of
one of his posthumous printed books that were noted by the editor of
Heidegger's collected works after the latter's death. I
The interpretation of van Gogh's painting in my article is support­
ed not only by the texts and work of other artists and writers I have
cited but also by van Gogh's own spoken words about the significance
of the shoes in his life.
Gauguin, who spent a few months with van Gogh as his guest in
Aries in the fall of 1888, recorded in two somewhat different articles a
conversation at that time about van Gogh's shoes. The first is quoted
on p. 140 in this volume.
Another version of Gauguin's story is in a later article that he pub­
lished with the title "Nature Mortes" (Still Lifes) in the periodical
Essais d'Art Libre after van Gogh's death:

"When we were together in Arles, both of us mad, in continual struggle for

beautiful colors, I adored red; where could one find a perfect vermilion? He,

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 THEOR Y AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART

with his yellowish brush, traced on the wall which suddenly became violet:

Je suis sain d'Esprit [I am whole in Spirit]

Je suis Ie Saint-Esprit [I am the Holy Spirit]

"In my yellow-room-a small still life: violet that one. Two enormous wornout

misshapen shoes. They were Vincent's shoes. Those that he took one fine morning,

when they were new, for his journey on foot from Holland to Belgium. The young

preacher had just finished his theological studies in order to be a minister like his

father. He had gone off to the mines to those whom he called his brothers, such as

he had seen in the Bible, the oppressed simple laborers for the luxury of the rich.

"Contrary to the teaching of his wise Dutch professors, Vincent had

believed in a Jesus who loved the poor; and his soul, deeply pervaded by charity,

sought the consoling words and sacrifice for the weak, and to combat the rich.

Very decidedly, Vincent was already mad.

"His teaching of the Bible in the mines, 1 believed, profited the miners

below and was disagreeable to the high authorities above ground.· He was quick­

ly recalled and dismissed, and the assembled family council, having decided he

was mad, recommended confinement for his health. However, he was not locked

up, thanks to his brother Theo.

"In the dark, black mine one day, chrome yellow overflowed, a terrible

fiery glow of damp-fire, the dynamite of the rich who don't lack just that. The

creatures who crawled at that moment grovelled in the filthy coal; they said

'adieu' to life that day, good.cbye to their fellow-men without blasphemy.

"One of them horribly mutilated, his face burnt, was picked up by Vincent.

'However,' said the company doctor, 'the man is done for, unless by a miracle,

or by very expensive motherly care. No, it's foolish to be concerned with him, to

busy oneself with him.'

"Vincent believed in miracles, in maternal care. The madman (decidedly he

was mad) sat up, keeping watch forty days, at the dying man's bedside.

Stubbornly he kept the air from getting into his wounds and paid for the medi­

cines. A comforting priest (decidedly, he was mad). The patient talked. The

mad effort brought a dead Christian back to life.

"When the injured man, finally saved, went down again to the mine to

resume his labors, 'You could have seen,' said Vincent, 'the martyred head of

Jesus, bearing on his brow the zigzags of the Crown of Thorns, the red scars of

the sickly yellow of a miner's brow.'

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 FURTHER NOTES ON HEIDEGGER AND VAN GOGH

"'And I, Vincent, 1 painted him,' tracing with his yellow brush, suddenly

turned violet , he cried

'I am the Holy Spirit

'I am whole in Spirit

"Decidedly, this man was mad.,,2

Frans:ois Gauzi, a fellow student in Corman's atelier in Paris in

1886- 1887, has written of van Gogh showing him in his Paris studio a
painting he was finishing of a pair of shoes. "At the flea market, he had
bought a pair of old shoes, heavy and thick, the shoes of a carter (char­
retier) but clean and freshly polished . They were fancy shoes (cro­
quenots riches). He put them on, one rainy afternoon, and went out for
a walk along the fortifications. Spotted with mud, they became inter­
esting....Vincent copied his pair of shoes faithfully."3
My colleague, Jospeh Masheck, had called my attention to a letter
of Flaubert that illustrates his perception of aging shoes as a personal
object-a simile of the human condition.Reflecting on the inevitable
decay of the living body, he wrote to Louise Colet in 1846: "In the
mere sight of an old pair of shoes there is something profoundly
melancholy.When you think of all the steps you have taken in them to
only God knows where, of all the grass you have trodden, all the mud
you have collected ...
the cracked leather that yawns as if to tell you:
'well, you dope, buy another pair of patent leather, shiny, crackling­
they will get to be like me, like you some day, after you have soiled
many an upper and sweated in many a vamp."4 Since this letter, dated
December 13, 1846, was published in 1887, it could have been read by
Flaubert's great admirer van Gogh.
The idea of a picture of his shoes was perhaps suggested by a
drawing reproduced in Sensier's book on Millet, Peintre et Paysan,
published in r864.5 Van Gogh was deeply impressed by this book and
referred to it often in his letters.6 The peasant-painter Millet's name
appears over two hundred times in his correspondence. Comparison of
Millet's drawing of his wooden sabot with van Gogh's painting of
shoes confirms what I have said about the pathos and crucial personal
reference in the latter. Millet's sabots are presented in profile on the
ground with indications of grass and hay.

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 THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART

It was Millet's practice to give to friends and admirers a drawing of

a pair of sabots in profile as a sign of his own life-long commitment to
pe:tsant life'?
This personal view of an artist's shoes appears in a signed litho­
graph by Daumier of an unhappy aggrieved artist standing before a
doormat of the annual Salon and displaying in his hands to passers-by
a framed canvas of a painting of a pair of shoes, evidently his own. The
protesting label reads: "They have rejected this, the dopes." It was
reproduced in an issue of the comic magazine Le Charivari, and later
in a volume of Daumier's lithographs of figures, scenes, and episodes
of contemporary life. It dated from a time when protest from artists
rejected by the jury of academic artists who judged the paintings sub­
mitted for admission to the annual salon won the support for a Salon
without an official jury from the French emperor, Louis Napoleon III.

**********

One can describe van Gogh's painting of his shoes as a picture of

objects seen and felt by the artist as a significant part of himself-he
faces himself like a mirrored image-chosen, isolated, carefully
arranged, and addressed to himself. Is there not in that singular artistic
conception an aspect of the intimate and personal, a soliloquy, and
expression of the pathos of a troubled human condition in the drawing
of an ordinarily neat and in fact well-fitted, self-confident, over-pro­
tected clothed body? The thickness and heaviness of the impasto pig­
ment substance, the emergence of the dark shoes from shadow into
light, the irregular, angular patterns and surprisingly loosened curved
laces extending beyond the silhouettes of the shoes, are not all these
component features of van Gogh's odd conception of the shoes?
These qualities are not found, at least in the same degree, in his
many pictures of peasants' shoes. His style has a range of qualities that
vary with both the occasion and mood of the moment and his interest
in unusual types of theme. It is not my purpose here to account for the
marked changes in style when he moves from Holland to Paris and
again when he paints in Arles and then in the asylum at St. Remy. But
I may note-in order to avoid misunderstanding-that in realizing

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 FURTHER NOTES ON HEIDEGGER AND VAN GOGH

that image of his dilapidated shoes, the artist's tense attitude, which
governs his painting of other subjects at a later time-e.g. the self­
probing portraits, one with his own heavily bandaged face (the result
of a self-inflicted wound of the left ear-lobe), his moods and memories
in confronting just those isolated personal objects-perhaps induced
the frank revelation of a morbid side of the artist's self There is then
in the work an expression of the self in bringing to view an occasion of
feeling that is unique in so far as it is engaged with the deviant and
absorbing deformed subject that underlies the unique metaphoric
paired shoes.
Van Gogh's frequent painting of paired shoes isolated from the
body and its costume as a whole may be compared to the importance
he gave in conversation to the idea of the shoe as a symbol of his life­
long practice of walking, and an ideal of life as a pilgrimage, a perpetu­
al change Qf experience.
Comparing van Gogh with other artists, one can say that few could
have chosen to devote an entire canvas to their own shoes in isolation,
yet addressed to a cultivated viewer. Hardly Manet, or Cezanne, or
Renoir, hardly his often cited model, Millet. And of these few-we can
judge from the examples-none would have represented the shoes as
van Gogh did-set on the ground facing the viewer, the loosened and
folded parts of shoes, the laces, the unsightly differences between parts
of the left and right, their depressed and broken aspect.
While attempting to define what "the equipmental being of equip­
ment is in truth," Heidegger ignores what those shoes meant to the
painter van Gogh himself He finds in this signed, unique painting of
the shoes that the philosopher had chosen to consider as most signifi­
cant a "peasant's wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the
trembling before the advent of birth and the shivering at the surround­
ing menace of death....This equipment belongs to the earth (his italics)
and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of that
secured belonging, the equipment itself rises to its resting-in-itself"­
as if these shoes were the ones worn by the supposed peasant woman
while at work in the fields. Heidegger even conjectures that his reader
could imagine himself wearing these old high leather shoes and "making

14 7
FlGcRE 1. Vincent van Gogh: Still Life with Open Bible, Candlestick, and Novel, 1885, oil on canvas,
25% x 30314", Vincent van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

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 FURTHER NOTES ON HEIDEGGER AND VAN GOGH

his way homeward with his hoe on an evening in the late fall after the
last potato fires have died down." So the truth about these shoes was
not only of the poor peasant woman "trembling before the advent of
birth" and "the surrounding menace of death"-as if the artist's point
of view were impersonal, even in placing the isolated shoes befire him
unlaced and facing the viewer, without the context of the potato field or
the disarray of the laces.
Heidegger believes also that this truth is divined by him "without any
philosophical theory" and would not be disclosed by any actual pair of
peasant shoes alone, detached from the feet, as portrayed in a painting.
One misses in all this both a personal sense of the expression and
of van Gogh's feelings of "rejection" by his own parents and by his
learned teachers who had to come to doubt his fitness as a Christian
preacher and missionary. These breaks are familiar to readers of van
Gogh's biography and letters.
When one compares the painting with the one preceding it, of his
father's open Bible, its significance becomes clearer. In that large paint- FIG. I

ing with the marginal presence of the small paperback volume of Zola's
La Jaie de Vivre (a modest statement of van Gogh's contrasted alterna-
tive to the great massive Bible and exposed text of the opened Bible),
he acknowledges his respect for his deceased minister father and
alludes to his own Christian past, but also affirms his devotion to the
secular lessons of his admired living author. Unlike the perfectly legi-
ble printed title of Zola's book on its bright yellow cover, the religious
content of the massive open book is barely intimated in the few tiny
numerals (LUI) on the narrow band of the upper margin of the
exposed right leaf through the few Latin signs of its page and chapter
number and the barely visible ancient author's name ISAI.. .. But the
actual words of this great prophet are withheld from the viewer by the
thick, vehement overlay of van Gogh's opaque brush strokes on the
immovable massive book and the ironically covered text of those pages,
which concern the sacrifices and sufferings of the prophet Isaiah .
The meaning of these contrasts might be deciphered by an habitu­
al scholarly reader of the sacred book, but will remain dosed to an
ordinary instructed viewer who has freed himself from the authority of

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 THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ART

his pious parents and church and can readily grasp the signficance of
the small paperback book with the familiar speaking title on the bright
sunny cover, La Joie de Vivre (The Joy of Living).8

**********

In Heidegger's reprint of "The Origin of the Work of Art" in his

Collected Works9 there is a second thought or cautious note that the
philosopher had added by hand in his personal copy of the Reclam
paperback edition of the essay (1960). It is on the margin beside his
sentence: "From van Gogh's painting we cannot say with certainty
where these shoes stand ("Nach dem Gemalde konnen wir nicht einmal
feststellen wo diese Schuhe stehen") nor to whom they belong ("und
wem sie gehoren"). According to the editor, Fr.W. von Herrmann, the
handwritten notes in this copy were written between 1960 and 1976,
the year Heidegger died (p. 380). The reader of these corrections will
recall their author's original lyrical recognition in those shoes of their
deep significance as placed on the earth and in the world of the peas­
ants at work.
In publishing a selection from the marginal notes in the new edition,
the editor followed the author's instructons to select those essential ones
that clarified the text or were self critical, or called attention to a later
development of Heidegger's thought.IO Since Heidegger's argument
throughout refers to the shoes of a class of persons, not of a particular
individual-and he states more than once that the shoes are those of a
peasant woman-it is hard to see why the note was necessary. Did he
wish to affirm, in the face of current doubts, that his metaphysical inter­
preatation was true, even if the shoes had belonged to van Gogh?

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 FURTHER NOTES ON HEIDEGGER AND VAN GOGH

J There is also thorough critical analysis of Hcidegger's philosophy in a latcr book by Jean Wahl
bearing on Heideggcr's idea of being, applied by Hcidegger to shoes and art. Sec]. Wahl, La Fin de
{'ontologie, 1956, and concluding pages.

2 Gauguin,P. Natures Morles, EISa;.' d'art libre, IV, January, 1894, pp. 273-275. These two excerpted
texts were kindly brought to my attention by Professor Mark Roskill.

3 Fran�ois Gauzi, Lautrec el SUII Temps, Paris, 1954, pp. 31-32.

4 Correspo1U!ena, I, Editions Pleiade, P.41.

5 Sec English translation of Jean Francois Millet, Peasant and Pain/er, Boston & N.Y., 1896, p.127.

6 Versamelde Brievetl, 1954, I: 322, 323; II:404; III:I4, 45, 85,151,328; IV: 32, )2.

7 Ibid.

8 Ironical, for in fact its story is not of the joys of family life, but of the constraints upon the idealistic
young members' dedication to a career in music, etc. Judy Sund writes (True to Temperament, van
Gogh and French Naturalist Litemture, pp. 109-113) that such novels had long been bones of con­
tention between van Gogh and his father.

9 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgahe, V. Klostermann, Frankfnrt am Main, 1977, Band V, Holzwcge,

p.18.

10 Gesamtausgahe, V, pp. 377-380.

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